Communing with robots is interested in notions of trust and privacy in the Smart City and the Internet of Things (IoT) –specifically, how an individual’s sense of agency might be affected in cities increasingly mediated by information communications technologies empowered by AI.
When I made Communing with robots in 2022, this was a relatively obscure thing to do. However, a year later, there was an estimated 100 million monthly active users of ChatGPT-3.5 – the 'fastest-growing consumer application in history’ (Hu 2023) – just two months after its launch. This represents the hyper-speed at which Silicone Valley techno-monopolies are now able to capture everyday social and mental experiences of global populations and transform them into a capital commodity and immense wealth–tax free.
Communing with robots uses satire to provide cathartic relief to the pervasive use of AIs and the rhetoric and surrounding them, in everyday life through a playful civic hack using generative artificial intelligence models. It was exhibited at Curiocity as an installation for The World Science Festival 2022, in the South Bank Parklands to provide citizens with a space to reflect and contemplate existence in the hyper-networked city by proposing a slightly subversive creative transformation of a tiny part of the public sphere.
Communing with robots asks: what will human agency mean when centralised artificial intelligence mediates our experience of public and private life? Will anonymity, privacy and trust be possible in a world where AI ‘knows’ you better than you know yourself? (Queensland Museum Network 2022)
The kinetic text is robotic fiction, AI poetry generated by the GPT-2 algorithm that uses nucleus sampling to search neural networks on the internet. GPT-2 scrapes and remixes data from web sources including news, fiction, songs, poems, films, recipes, code, and HTML. The diverse and often bizarre references to fictional characters and situations are strangely beautiful. With childlike innocence, poetry emerges from GPT-2’s non-human choice of words and the glitchy AI voice overs made using gen-AI audio tools. The coloured imagery is pseudo-surveillance imagery created in and around the South Bank Parklands where the installation was placed during the World Science Festival, Brisbane 2022.